Extra helping of praise served up with pancakes

The Bay serves a pancake breakfast on Saturday in Vancouver to those who helped clean up the riot mess on Thursday and also for those who protect the city and residents.Nick Procaylo
/ PNG

There was no shortage of people trying to do the right thing when a riot broke out Wednesday night after the Stanley Cup Final. This fan, for example, yelled "time out" to a group of thugs before letting the police step in and restore peace and order. On Saturday, many of those stories of bravery were shared as The Bay offered its appreciation with a pancake breakfast in downtown Vancouver.Jason Payne
/ PNG

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Hundreds of Lower Mainlanders gathered to eat pancakes, sing, dance and write on the boarded-up storefront of The Bay in downtown Vancouver Saturday morning, as part of the city’s ongoing catharsis after the Game 7 Stanley Cup Final riots.

Several heroes who tried to stop Wednesday night’s destruction mingled discretely with people from all walks of life and talked about how and why they stood up when very few others did.

“I saw a guy trip over one of the knocked-over police barricades, his girlfriend was trying to help him up and some young punk with a bandana over his face threw a pop bottle into the girl’s face. Deliberately,” said 27-year-old Kris Griffin, a sound engineering student. “That’s when I figured there’s more I could be doing down here helping people out and trying to keep as much stability as possible.”

What makes Griffin’s heroism remarkable is he was in the first fight that sparked the flipping of the original torched car in front of the Canada Post office at the epicentre of the riots.

A devoted Boston Bruins fan — he’d have to be to wear his jersey to the live site for Game 7 — Griffin first saw trouble brewing when a Canucks fan ran up and spat in his face during the second period. Before Vancouver’s Stanley Cup hopes were officially dashed, a group of five or six thugs jumped him.

The hooligans kicked and punched him until about 10 other crowd members tore them off and formed a protective ring around Griffin, allowing him to regain his composure and his belongings.

“Nobody could get within 10 feet unless I wanted them to, it was very impressive,” Griffin said. “It sounds kind of dramatic, but I was quite afraid for my life at some points during that and these people, I owe them the world.”

After evacuating the live site, Griffin began to stand up for his city, taking photos of rioters with his camera and phone until that got too dangerous.

“So, I put everything away and made a final stand in front of the Georgia side of The Bay here with a group of other people,” Griffin said. “I had my skateboard with me and I was kind of baseballing rocks away and shielding the windows and using it as kind of a barricade to push people away when they started trying to flood everything.

“It was a crazy night, it was very surreal.”

Unbeknownst to Griffin, a fellow defender of the storefront that night had just walked past him.

Robert MacKay, the solitary man who got pummelled into submission by rioters while defending The Bay in a clip now famous on YouTube, glided anonymously throughout the crowd with his girlfriend Saturday morning.

The couple were looking at the messages people had written on the boarded-up windows and MacKay refused to be interviewed.

Another hero in the crowd was 40-year-old Becky Severy, a single mother from Coquitlam, she was watching the game at the Georgia Street live site with her nine-year-old son Jaden when the mayhem erupted.

She took shelter in The Bank of Montreal's ABM area at the front when the rioters began smashing the windows.

“First I started yelling at [the rioters] because the anger took over,” Severy said. “It was really scary.”

Severy ran with her son to safety at Granville Street, shielding Jaden from the tear gas with a blanket.

“Then I brought him down on Thursday to help with the clean-up because I didn’t want [the riot] to be the lasting image in his mind,” Severy said. “As a parent, what are you teaching your kids? At that age you should know the difference between right and wrong.”

Thursday’s clean-up and Saturday’s pancake breakfast helped Severy and her son come to terms with the destruction they witnessed.

“I’m an adult, I can make sense of [the riot] to some degree, but a child has a harder time and I think seeing the good is going to restore his faith a lot more than just words.”

Many passing by stopped to chat with others or read the message boards, which store director Dana Hall said will come down on Monday and be donated to the city archives.

Hall said Good Samaritans are still returning stolen items found on the street to the store and Saturday’s breakfast was a way to show gratitude to heroes such as Griffin and MacKay and the others who showed up the morning after to help clean. “This is a thank you to Vancouver, to each and every person that has helped support us.”

Mayor Gregor Robertson was on site and said the lack of liquor checks during Game 7 at the live site was because “there were so many people it overwhelmed fencing and checkpoints.”

The mayor said he is still working with authorities to set up an independent review of how the riot developed.

“We’re going to have to look at how alcohol influenced this situation and how we ensure that doesn’t happen again,” Robertson said.

The mayor also said he did not know how the cars that eventually got flipped and burned were allowed into the live site.

“I don’t have any info on the cars that were inside, that’s a piece that will be obviously studied during the review,” Roberston said.

Jeremiah Humphrey, a 30-year-old Langara student, got caught up in the celebration of civic pride, but had a message for a mayor and a city hoping to turn the corner on an embarrassing episode.

“Honestly just a second ago, as much as I was feeling so full of love and compassion for the city, I became disgusted when I turned to the side and saw what we just met here [pointing to a homeless man asleep curled up next to the storefront],” Humphrey said. “[There’s] someone just kind of laying right beside all this love and appreciation for the city, but they still choose to ignore one of the serious problems, which is homelessness.”

“I’d like to see this kind of togetherness and effort that we’ve taken to come together and solve this problem maybe focused on that similar problem [of homelessness].”

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Extra helping of praise served up with pancakes

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